In the midst of the darkest days of political turmoil around the world, art will rip the winter darkness like fiery rays of sunlight and cement the persistent luminosity of the human spirit. Aaron Johnson’s new solo show ”Staring at the Sun” provides a lens into his personal quest to seek light in dark times.

Johnson’s newest paintings present multitudes of figures who emerge from washes of paint stained into raw canvas. While Johnson has always been an experimental painter, with tricks over the years ranging from painting in reverse to crusting up his canvases with old socks, in these new works he expresses his most direct and expressionistic painterly narrative. Johnson seems to have taken his hands off the wheel, allowing the paint to gush around the canvas, and he has taken off the gloves (or the socks off), inviting raw and gritty figures into the ring.

The figures in Aaron Johnson’s works resonate with us in various emotional and psychological moments of romance, menace, humor, and horror. His quest to pierce the darkness with sunlight is played out in mysterious narrative scenes, where we see figures melting in and out of each other, and into their surrounding nature and landscapes.

The exhibition’s largest painting “Nothing Comes From Nowhere” presents a raucous gathering of mysterious characters, suggesting cowboys, carnies, angles, demons, shamans, zombies and spirits. We observe how the figures germinate from pours and bleeds of paint, resulting in a haunting ghostly energy. In “Staring at the Sun”, the titular painting of this exhibition, we witness a colorful crowd of sunseekers, gathered around a blazing orange orb. The swirling figurative composition pulls the viewer right in, to join this procession around the sun.

Aaron Johnson lures us into his weird and wonderful painterly world with a juicy sense of color and salacious comic grotesque energy.

The exhibition shows 9 acrylic paintingsAaron Johnson will be present at the opening and available for interviews.Contact the gallery at [email protected] or phone + 45 33 33 93 96 for further information

Sasha Bogojev from Juxtapoz Magazine has been on a studio visit with Aaron Johnson while his exhibition was in the making. Read the article HERE